18.04.2023
Couple Created New Rainforest By Planting 2 Million Trees Over 20 Years
A married couple had helped breathe new life into the world's lungs by restoring a barren plot of land into a healthy rainforest. Photojournalist Sebastião Ribeiro Salgado and his wife Lélia decided to replant the forest seeing how the area around his family’s cattle ranch had diminished. Now 20 years later, the 1,754-acre plot of land is the lush and verdant forest Salgado remembered as a child. Restoring the land to its former glory would be a mammoth task, so in 1998 the Salgados set up the Instituto Terra – an organisation ‘dedicated to the sustainable development of the Valley of the River Doce.’ Now the area has status as a Private Natural Heritage Reserve and is home to 172 types of birds, 33 varieties of mammals and 15 kinds of reptiles and amphibians. Hundreds of species of trees and plants now grow there, dried up springs have started flowing again and the micro-climate has changed. Financial support comes from different partners, both from the government and private sectors, as well as from individual donors from various countries and other Third Sector institutions. In addition to helping maintain the RPPN Fazenda Bulcão conservation unit, with a botanical garden project open to visitors free of charge, sponsorships also enable projects that involve the restoration of conservation areas, applied scientific research and constant environmental education which includes the rural-ecological training of local young people and support for the ecological development of residents in their surroundings, including traditional communities, from small farmers to indigenous peoples. Credit: BRIGHTVIBES
Poverty deprives people of adequate education, health care and of life's most basic necessities- safe living conditions (including clean air and clean drinking water) and an adequate food supply. The developed (industrialized) countries today account for roughly 20 percent of the world's population but control about 80 percent of the world's wealth.
Poverty and pollution seem to operate in a vicious cycle that, so far, has been hard to break. Even in the developed nations, the gap between the rich and the poor is evident in their respective social and environmental conditions.
Poverty and pollution seem to operate in a vicious cycle that, so far, has been hard to break. Even in the developed nations, the gap between the rich and the poor is evident in their respective social and environmental conditions.
